A collection of previously published essays. Includes index. Table of Contents: Moral theology looks at itself: The historical development of moral theology. Moral theology in the United States. What is distinctive and unique about Christian ethics and Christian morality? Moral theology in dialogue with biomedicine and bioethics -- Moral theology looks at our society: Just taxation in the Roman Catholic tradition. Filial responsibility for an elderly parent. Religious freedom and human rights in the world and in the church. An analysis of the United States bishops' pastoral letter on the economy. The difference between personal morality and public policy.

In this volume, William C. Mattison, III demonstrates that virtue ethics provides a helpful key for unlocking the moral wisdom of the Sermon on the Mount. Showing how familiar texts such as the Beatitudes and Petitions of the Lord's Prayer are more richly understood, and can even be aligned with the theological and cardinal virtues, he also locates in the Sermon classic topics in morality, such as the nature of happiness, intentionality, the intelligibility of human action, and the development of virtue. Yet far from merely placing the teaching of Aristotle in the mouth of Jesus, he demonstrates how the Sermon presents an account of happiness and virtue transformed in the light of Christian faith. The happiness portrayed is that of the Kingdom of heaven, and the habits needed to participate in it in the next life, but even initially in this one, are possible only by God's grace through Jesus Christ, and lived in the community that is the Church.

Noonan's analysis of the development in Catholic moral teaching on usury, contraception, religious freedom, slave-holding, and divorce.

How can ordinary Christians find moral guidance for the mundane dilemmas they confront in their daily lives? To answer this question, Julie Hanlon Rubio brings together a rich Catholic theology of marriage and a strong commitment to social justice to focus on the place where the ethics of ordinary life are played out: the family. Sex, money, eating, spirituality, and service. According to Rubio, all are areas for practical application of an ethics of the family. In each area, intentional practices can function as acts of resistance to a cultural and middle-class conformity that promotes materialism over relationships. These practices forge deep connections within the family and help families live out their calling to be in solidarity with others and participate in social change from below. It is through these everyday moral choices that most Christians can live out their faith—and contribute to progress in the world.

SINCE 2002, THE SYMPOSIUM NEW WINE, NEW WINESKINS HAS OFFERED AN OPPORTUNITY for young Catholic moral theologians to engage in shared work and conversation. Here, the fruits of these labors are gathered into one collection, which represents the wide scope of the future of Catholic sexual ethics. This volume offers the first collection of a new generation's approaches to Catholic sexual ethics. The collection displays young scholars with diverse views, yet whose work moves beyond the impasses that have beset the field. The volume offers original and engaging essays on a variety of topics, from the hook-up culture and dating violence, to cohabitation and homosexuality, to contraception and natural family planning, to the promises and pitfalls of "the theology of the body." The authors display a fresh engagement with these issues in conversation with the Christian tradition and with contemporary culture. David Cloutier provides an introduction that locates this work within the past decades of Catholic scholarship, and articulates new categories for future work. The essays also offer practical insights and models that will interest pastors and lay ministers, as well as scholars. Contributors include: Fr. Nicanor Pier Giorgio Austriaco, O.P., Ph.D., S.T.L., is an assistant professor of biology and an instructor of theology at Providence College in Providence, Rhode Island. In theology, Fr. Austriaco teaches courses and has research interests in bioethics, sexual ethics, and fundamental moral theology. Jana Marguerite Bennett is assistant professor of religious studies at the University of Dayton, where she teaches courses in sexual ethics and Catholic moral theology. She has written more about singleness and the relationship between singleness and marriage in her book Water is Thicker than Blood: An Augustinian Theology of Marriage and Singleness (Oxford UP, 2008). Florence Caffrey Bourg is the author of Where Two or Three Are Gathered: Christian Families as Domestic Churches (University of Notre Dame Press), as well as many articles and reviews on theology of marriage and family. Dr. Bourg taught at the College of Mount St. Joseph in Cincinnati before returning home to New Orleans. She now teaches at the Academy of the Sacred Heart, and has been a visiting professor at Loyola University and Springhill College. David Cloutier is assistant professor of theology at Mount St. Mary's University in Emmitsburg, MD. He is the author of Love, Reason, and God's Story: An Introduction to Catholic Sexual Ethics (Anselm Academic/Saint Mary's Press, 2008), as well as a number of essays on Catholic sexual ethics and fundamental moral theology. Jason King is currently chair of the theology department at St. Vincent College in Latrobe, PA. His works include Save the Date: A Spirituality of Dating, Love, Dinner and the Divine (Crossroad, 2003), Dating: A Practical Catholic Guide (Knights of Columbus Supreme Council Veritas Series, 2007), and "Ecumenical Marriage as Leaven for Christian Unity" in the Journal of Ecumenical Studies. He has recently done work for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops website For Your Marriage. He is married and has three children. William C. Mattison III is assistant professor of theology at the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC. His primary area of research is Thomistic moral theology and virtue ethics. He recently completed an introductory book entitled Introducing Moral Theology: True Happiness and the Virtues (Brazos, 2008). David Matzko McCarthy is the Father Forker Professor of Catholic Social Teaching at Mount St. Mary's University in Emmitsburg, MD. He is the author of Sex and Love in the Home: A Theology of the Household (SCM Press, 2001, 2004 revised ed.), and The Good Life: Genuine Christianity for the Middle Class (Wipf & Stock, 2009). Maria C. Morrow is a doctoral candidate at the University of Dayton whose interests in Catholic moral theology include the interconnection of virtue and sacrament, with particular interest in penance. Christopher C. Roberts is the author of Creation & Covenant: the significance of sexual difference in the moral theology of marriage (Continuum, 2008). He is a research fellow in the ethics program at Villanova University. He graduated from Yale, Oxford and King's College London and is a former PBS television reporter. Julie Hanlon Rubio is associate professor of Christian ethics at St. Louis University. She is the author of A Christian Theology of Marriage and Family (Paulist Press, 2003) and Family Ethics: Practices for Christians (Georgetown University Press, 2010), and co-editor of Readings in Moral Theology No. 15: Marriage (Paulist Press, 2009). She lives in St. Louis with her husband and three sons. Michel Therrien is a professor of Fundamental Moral Theology and the Academic Dean at St. Vincent Seminary. He holds a Licentiate in Sacred Theology from the International Theological Institute for Studies on Marriage and the Family in Tramau, Austria, and a Doctorate in Fundamental Moral Theology from the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. Kari-Shane Davis Zimmerman teaches at the College of Saint Benedict/Saint John's University in Minnesota. She specializes in courses that deal with the intersection of family and church life, as well as issues pertaining to sex and work. She received her Ph.D. in theological ethics from Marquette University in 2007.

Economists and theologians usually inhabit different intellectual worlds. Economists investigate the workings of markets and tend to set ethical questions aside. Theologians, anxious to take up concerns raised by market outcomes, often dismiss economics and lose insights into the influence of market incentives on individual behavior. Mary L. Hirschfeld, who was a professor of economics for fifteen years before training as a theologian, seeks to bridge these two fields in this innovative work about economics and the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas. According to Hirschfeld, an economics rooted in Thomistic thought integrates many of the insights of economists with a larger view of the good life, and gives us critical purchase on the ethical shortcomings of modern capitalism. In a Thomistic approach, she writes, ethics and economics cannot be reconciled if we begin with narrow questions about fair wages or the acceptability of usury. Rather, we must begin with an understanding of how economic life serves human happiness. The key point is that material wealth is an instrumental good, valuable only to the extent that it allows people to flourish. Hirschfeld uses that insight to develop an account of a genuinely humane economy in which pragmatic and material concerns matter but the pursuit of wealth for its own sake is not the ultimate goal. The Thomistic economics that Hirschfeld outlines is thus capable of dealing with our culture as it is, while still offering direction about how we might make the economy better serve the human good.

The 1960 publication of We Hold These Truths marked a significant event in the history of modern American thought. Since that time, Sheed & Ward has kept the book in print and has published several studies of John Courtney Murray's life and work. We are proud to present a new edition of this classic text, which features a comprehensive introduction by Peter Lawler that places Murray in the context of Catholic and American history and thought while revealing his relevance today. From the new Introduction by Peter Lawler: The Jesuit John Courtney Murray (1904-67) was, in his time, probably the best known and most widely respected American Catholic writer on the relationship between Catholic philosophy and theology and his country's political life. The highpoint of his influence was the publication of We Hold These Truths in the same year as an election of our country's first Catholic president. Those two events were celebrated by a Time cover story (December 12, 1960) on Murray's work and influence. The story's author, Protestant Douglas Auchincloss, reported that it was "The most relentlessly intellectual cover story I've done." His amazingly wide ranging and dense-if not altogether accurate-account of Murray's thought was crowned with a smart and pointed conclusion: "If anyone can help U.S. Catholics and their non-Catholic countrymen toward the disagreement that precedes understanding-John Courtney Murray can." . . . Murray's work, of course, is treated with great respect and has had considerable influence, but now it's time to begin to think of him as one of America's very few genuine political philosophers. His disarmingly lucid and accessible prose has caused his book to be widely cited and celebrated, but it still is not well understood. It is both praised and blamed for reconciling Catholic faith with the fundamental premises of American political life. It is praised by liberals for paving the way for Vatican II's embrace of the American idea of religious liberty, and it is